Given the widespread availability and usage of the internet by consumers, many businesses have become interested in being able to effectively monitor the content and commentary provided by such consumers. Interactive websites such as social networks and blogs provide a wealth of useful information that can be advantageously used by a business.
It would be very useful to provide an effective mechanism to allow businesses and enterprise business applications to interact with and take action upon data that originate from online sources of social data and commentary. For example, consider a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) application, which is designed to facilitate the ability of a business to create, develop, and build relationships with its customers or potential customers. It would be very desirable to allow the business CRM application to stay informed of actionable social networking content, for example, to identify potential customers and possible sales leads.
As another example, brand managers are often interested in monitoring commentary on the internet regarding their brands or competitors' brands. Brand managers may read the commentary to gauge interest in their marketing materials, receive feedback regarding their products, or take further action regarding any inflammatory postings.
Embodiments of the present invention provide a system, method, and computer program product for allowing a business entity to access and integrate with social media data. The invention is capable of accessing data across multiple types of internet-based sources of social data and commentary and to perform semantic analysis upon that data. Tags are associated with the analyzed content that pertain to actionable categorization of the data. Community managers can then view and take action with respect to the data. In addition, enterprise business applications can utilize the tagged data to perform business processing.
Embodiments of the invention also provide a method, system, and computer program product for semantically analyzing the content within an internal social network. Using the results of the analysis, the executives can gain a better understanding of, and insight into, the organization and its employees. A dashboard tool may be used in some embodiments of the invention to visualize the results of the semantic analysis.
Other additional objects, features, and advantages of the invention are described in the detailed description, figures, and claims.